Do you enjoy watching Microsoft squirm as it tries to grapple with the open-source software movement? Well, there's a similar opportunity to rattle the cages of entrenched corporate powers, but this time it's the cages of hardware companies.
Fab@Home

Bringing the open-source movement's collaborative approach to hardware is the ambition of the Fab@Home project at Cornell University. Project members hope to popularize all-purpose manufacturing devices--variously known as fabbers, 3D printers or rapid prototyping machines--and share the blueprints of the physical objects those machines can produce.

The project offers a free design for a fabber--itself a modifiable design--as well as templates for some objects it can build. The project's aspiration is to "democratize innovation."

"A fabber can allow you explore new designs, e-mail physical objects to other fabber owners, and most importantly, set your ideas free," project organizers say on their Web pages. "Just like the Internet and MP3s have freed musical talent from control of big labels, so can widespread (rapid prototyping) divorce technological innovation from the control of big corporations.

About the author

Stephen Shankland has been a reporter at CNET since 1998 and covers browsers, Web development, digital photography and new technology. In the past he has been CNET's beat reporter for Google, Yahoo, Linux, open-source software, servers and supercomputers. He has a soft spot in his heart for standards groups and I/O interfaces.
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